Obama to create new council to boost VA efficiency

President Obama on Friday will announce the creation of a new advisory committee aimed at improving the Veterans Affairs Department to meet the various needs of the nation’s current and former servicemembers.

The panel will be made up of private sector, nonprofit and government leaders and will assist the department, still recovering from one of the biggest scandals in its history, “on additional ways the VA can work to improve customer service delivery and veteran outcomes and set the course for longer-term excellence and reform,” according to a White House official.

{mosads}The members possess experience in “customer service, large-scale organizational change and advocacy for veterans” and will include business leaders, veteran service organizations members, and health sciences and academic professionals, the official added.

The announcement comes as the president and VA leaders are due to visit the Phoenix facility that was ground zero in last year’s scandal over patient wait times.

Obama, along with VA Secretary Robert McDonald and his deputy, Sloan Gibson, will roll out the details of the new body during a roundtable discussion with local veteran leaders and congressional members.

An investigation last May found that veterans at the Carl T. Hayden VA Medical Center had waited an average of 115 days for initial appointments in Phoenix. Official data claimed the wait time was only 24 days. The investigation also showed 1,700 of veterans had been intentionally kept off official patient rolls.

Forty people died waiting to see a doctor, though officials could not conclusively link the deaths to the long wait times.

Then-VA Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned over the scandal, and Congress passed a $16.3 billion reform bill to revamp the agency. Sharon Helman, director of the Phoenix site, also lost her job, not over the wait times, but for accepting gifts from a healthcare organization.

The VA says that since the scandal broke last year, it has reached out to 4,000 patients in the Phoenix, including those kept on the secret rolls. 

Between last May and the end of January the agency has 30,000 authorizations for veterans to seek non-VA medical care and completed 476,000 appointments at the medical center, a 19 percent boost from last year, according to a VA fact sheet.

Between October and January the center in Arizona completed 94 percent of its appointments within the 30-day window the veteran requested.

And, as of January, the Phoenix site had hired 305 additional employees, less than half of the 800 positions the VA hopes to fill at the site over the next two years.